Printing devices are well-known for processing encoded page layout information to form a printed page. The page layout information is first formed into decoded and uncompressed page image data. The page image data is then sent to a raster scanned device, which prints discrete picture elements (pixels) at fixed physical locations on an output medium such as paper. Typically, the pixels have different colours, different intensities and possibly other variable parameters.
In many types of printing devices a high level description of image data to be printed is processed by a raster image processor (RIP) which converts the description into data held in memory for subsequent output to the raster scanned device. The high level description typically takes the form of a page description language (PDL) specification, which is an interchange standard for representing documents electronically within a system and ultimately printing those documents. A PDL file describes, among other things, how images are to be rendered on each page, what font is to be employed and how the pages are to be assembled. In other printer types, the high level description takes the form of bitmap image data which is transcoded into a format suitable for the raster output device for printing. Such printing devices usually containing a command language which enable transfer of said image data.
All the aforementioned printer types use memory for storing intermediate print data and some raster image processor (RIP) to format data into a representation suitable for the print output device.
Those skilled in the art of design of printer devices will appreciate that printing at high resolutions requires the generation of a large amount of raster output data and a correspondingly high amount of computational processing, that being both for rasterisation of a page description and colour conversion of rendered image data for colour output devices.
Game consoles typically comprise components for providing fast rendering of images on a display screen. Such game consoles typically do not have printing capabilities. Prior art game consoles with printing capabilities are only able to print to a resolution up to that of the display screen.
Furthermore, a raster image processor in such a game console is not intended to be used for printing, and in particular at resolutions higher than that of the display screen, as the raster image processor is incapable of generating the large amount of raster output data required for such a higher resolution print. This is due to limitations in processing capacity and raster image processor memory in such systems.